


The Wrong Shade of Red

by wouldyouliketoseemymask



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman - Fandom
Genre: Gen, mad love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 19:57:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18723901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wouldyouliketoseemymask/pseuds/wouldyouliketoseemymask
Summary: In the months since Harleen Quinzel walked out of the asylum doors uncuffed, freshly liberated and clutching that hard-won piece of paper declaring her clinically sane, she'd learned that freedom was either a strange, humorless thing or the biggest joke of them all.





	The Wrong Shade of Red

She had worn the same red lipstick for years—Cherry Romance, applied primly in her car before her shift at Arkham and later on slathered across the greasy surface of white face paint—but that was the Old Harley.  _New_  Harley tried  _new_ things. New Harley liked variety, or at least she would pretend to until she managed to halfway convince herself that she actually did.

In the months since Harleen Quinzel walked out of the asylum doors uncuffed, freshly liberated and clutching that hard-won piece of paper declaring her clinically sane, she'd learned that freedom was either a strange, humorless thing or the biggest joke of them all. She had thought she was free, once, back in those reckless days when she set fire to dynamite and pulled the trigger of a gun with fingers still sugar-sticky from cotton candy and laughed and laughed and laughed. Back then she smelled of gunpowder and left a trail of broken glass in her wake, and with each passing night she fell deeper and deeper in love with the wail of police sirens and the surge of adrenaline pounding through her veins and the warm sensation of another person's blood seeping through her jester suit to touch her bare skin. But she had left that Harley behind the cell glass in Arkham and emerged as someone else, someone who chose to attend therapy long after completing her court-mandated sessions and sat behind a desk for eight hours a day and wore her hair down in curls and blended in among the mundane herd traipsing along the sidewalk until she was just another unremarkable face in an unremarkable crowd. Yet even as she navigated her new life Harleen felt that at times she was merely wandering; she was free now,  _finally_ , but still she did not know what freedom actually meant to her.

One morning while dressing for work she stared into the mirror and felt the familiar teeth of self-doubt begin to sink into her. Harleen's reflection was undeniable evidence of her rebirth: gone was the coat of clown-white smeared by the fingers of a glove— _his_  glove—and the leather mask encircling blue eyes sparkling with wild excitement, gone were the wet streaks of makeup sliding down her cheeks to blacken two bursts of pink blush, gone was the tangle of blonde hair piled into knotted pigtails and peppered with dark clumps of dried blood spray from where her bullet had met a security officer's skull. In their place stood a woman Harleen no longer recognized.

Except for her lips. They were as a red as ever.

* * *

The red haunted Harleen throughout the day, appearing so often that it became inescapable. It bloomed along the plastic rim of the Gotham Cafe coffee she threw away after a single sip, returned as a bright smudge across a bleached napkin when she ate lunch, stained the cigarette she'd tried—and failed—to keep from smoking. Countless times she had worn the red, but its presence on her mouth now felt maddeningly strange and unbearable; like a lingering kiss from a tormentous specter, it pressed against her lips to remind her of who she once was and could never again be.

When she could take no more Harleen quietly locked herself in the women's restroom and wiped at her mouth roughly with paper towels, again and again and again, until she had emptied the dispenser. By the time she was done her face was chafed from the friction, her stinging lips swollen plump and rawly tender and so dry that the skin had begun to peel, but ultimately Harleen succeeded—the red had vanished almost entirely from her face, leaving behind only a faint, splotchy tint where there had once been vibrant color.

And so she found herself roaming the aisles of a beauty shop after work, browsing through the lipsticks to find another shade to smother the red away with, for if it was replaced then it could never again reappear to taunt her—to  _tempt_  her—and Cherry Romance would fade into just another memory, an unwelcome relic that belonged to her past and had no place in her future.

New Harley. New things.

Nothing immediately appealed to her; Harleen gazed into the displays featuring glossy images of smiling, laughing women with flawless airbrushed skin and immaculately-applied makeup and hair styled to perfection without so much as one stray strand, and realized that she could not imagine herself in their place. How could they smile when they had never taken in the sight of true spectacular absurdity, never heard a joke where the punch line was delivered with a literal explosion? How could they laugh when they had never experienced comedy on a visceral level, never witnessed someone bursting into gales of laughter so violent that they collapsed onto the ground and took their final breath with a mouth contorted into a teeth-baring, ear-to-ear grin? They had not lived a life like her past—a life of bullets and brutality and a big bad Bat—and so how could they be anything like her? How could  _she_  be anything like  _them_?

Still, she would try.

The lipsticks were overwhelming in their variety, ranging from seductive to saccharine: deep mattes the color of bruised plums and rich velvet, fuchsias so bright they bordered on obnoxious and speckled with flecks of glitter, glossy caramels with a shimmer akin to gold, soft peach-pinks with a buttery sheen, and an adventurous black that shone as slick as vinyl on a pouting model's round lips. But none called out to Harleen as the red once had, and suddenly the thought of another shade splayed across her mouth felt like a nauseating betrayal, as if she were casting aside a faithful longtime lover in favor of something vulgar and nonintimate.

Still, she would try.

More time passed, an eternity of embarrassment over her own indecisiveness. Other women had come and gone, sleek tubes of lipstick clutched in their manicured hands, selected with far less ceremony and trepidation than Harleen's present anguish. A brunette with highlighted hair and lashes thick with mascara peeked over Harleen's shoulder, so close that she caught a whiff of her perfume—something that reeked of artificial vanilla—and suddenly Harleen felt more self-conscious than ever. It all felt much too close, much too real—the store lights blazing down upon her with such brightness that she could sense the beginnings of a migraine hammering away at her skull, the mind-numbing bubblegum music chirping from the speakers on an infinite loop, the piercing click-clack sound of high heels meeting the white tile floor, endless rows of endless cosmetics promising to conceal endless flaws—and before she realized what she was doing Harleen grabbed a tube of Petal Pink and headed to a register. On her way she caught a glimpse of her reflection in an aisle mirror, and for a split-second Harleen saw the white paint, the black mask, the red grin; and then she was gone, and in her place stood that same woman who had become a complete stranger to Harleen.

Herself.

* * *

As she sat before her bedroom mirror, her frowning mouth a shade of pink more comparable to cake frosting than a light rose and her new purchase sunk to the bottom of a nearby trashcan, Harleen was frightened by how empty she felt. Throughout the course of her new life she had experienced a multitude of confusing, and at times conflicting, emotions—sadness, determination, regret, something that  _almost_  resembled happiness, and even private moments where her ironclad resolve faltered just long enough for Harleen to mourn her past and weep because she could never return to it—but she felt none of them now. There was only a vast, crushing void inside Harleen, as if her identity had been gouged out of her and her body stitched-up and left hollow, and with terrible clarity she realized that was exactly what they had done to her in Arkham. The prized piece of paper that had cost Harleen so dearly was nothing more than a worthless deception comprised of ink and overripe words and a desire to control a spirited woman, designed to keep her trapped and lifeless within their cell even after leaving the asylum. They had robbed Harleen of herself by prying open her mind with their self-righteous claws and plucking away her passion and her fun and her deep, all-consuming ability to love, and she had smiled, shook their hands, and  _thanked_  them for it.

Sickened with disgust, Harleen wiped the pink from her mouth and grabbed her purse, plunging a frantic hand inside to fumble about blindly before growing impatient and turning the bag over to spill its contents across the silken surface of her bedspread and scour through them madly. When she found what she she was searching for Harleen's heart leapt in her chest and set her pulse racing with an exhilaration unknown to her since the last night before Arkham had begun to dismantle her, when she'd been dragged into the asylum kicking her feet wildly and wearing a coat of someone else's blood.

She had never intended to throw it away. Not really.

She was ready to admit that now.

Harleen had been wrong. She hadn't left the Old Harley behind in Arkham. She couldn't. That Harley had been with her all along, because Harleen  _was_  Harley and nothing—no hours of therapy that had shifted from productive to tedious months ago, no long days spent languishing in a boresome job and no lonely nights spent nose-deep in a romance novel, no closet full of muted clothing devoid of so much as a single red thread, no drab apartment with walls yellowed from the previous tenant's cigarettes and a faucet that never stopped dripping, no knee-patting doctor to tell her great she was doing and not listen to a word she said—could ever change that. There was no Old Harley, there was no New Harley: there was only Harleen, no longer afraid to be herself.

Just  _Harley_.

For the first time in months, Harley finally recognized the woman in her reflection: the glimmer of blue in her eyes that was both playful and full of danger, the long-lost flush of excitement blossoming across her face, and—most wondrously of all—the corners of her mouth turning upwards to unveil a small, coy smile on her lips.

They were as red as ever.


End file.
